Certain delicate fabrics are not suitable for conventional in-home immersion cleaning processes. Home washing machines, which provide excellent cleaning results for the majority of fabrics used in today's society, can, under certain conditions, shrink or otherwise damage silk, linen, wool and other delicate fabrics. Consumers typically have their delicate fabric items “dry-cleaned”. Unfortunately, dry-cleaning usually involves immersing the fabrics in various hydrocarbon and halocarbon solvents that require special handling and the solvent must be reclaimed, making the process unsuitable for in-home use. Hence, dry-cleaning has traditionally been restricted to commercial establishments making it less convenient and more costly than in-home laundering processes.
Attempts have been made to provide in-home dry-cleaning systems that combine the fabric cleaning and refreshing of in-home, immersion laundering processes with the fabric care benefits of dry-cleaning processes. One such in-home system for cleaning and refreshing garments comprises a substrate sheet containing various liquid or gelled cleaning agents, and a plastic bag. The garments are placed in the bag together with the sheet, and then tumbled in a conventional clothes dryer. In a current commercial embodiment, multiple single-use flat sheets comprising a cleaning/refreshing agent and a single multi-use plastic bag are provided in a package.
Unfortunately, these prior processes often involved only one step with regards to temperature and relative humidity. That is, the tumble dryer was set for a particular temperature and time. The humidity in the bag was a function of the moisture loaded in the bag and the temperature setting. But once the time and temperature were selected, the one step process was set. Moreover, when using a conventional tumble dryer, the consumer is often limited to the manufacturer's pre-set temperature conditions, which are established for drying clothes, not for cleaning and refreshing them. Often these manufacturer's conditions are sub-optimal with respect to one or more of dewrinkling, deodorizing, and optionally perfume deposition.
Moreover, such in-home processes are designed for use in a conventional clothes dryer, or the like apparatus. Such apparatuses are not always readily available, they are often uneconomical, and in many countries clothes dryers are simply unnecessary. For example, in many warm tropical regions people do not typically own clothes dryers because their clothes can be dried year-round by hanging them outside in the sun. In the areas of the world where people do not typically own clothes dryers, products that require a heating apparatus, such as a clothes dryer, are of little or no value.
Steamer cabinets have also been utilized in the art to treat fabric articles with heavy doses of steam. Unfortunately, these high temperature, high relative humidity processes can have negative effects on fabric articles. In addition to the harsh effect on fabrics, a drying step is often required that puts even further strain on the fabrics. The drying step also requires additional time and energy, and often results in undesirable shrinkage. And finally, steamer cabinets are typically wasteful with respect to steam because it is only water.
Thus, there is a need to develop a domestic, non-immersion cleaning and refreshing process, and cleaning and refreshing compositions for use therein, which provides acceptable cleaning without the need for a tumble dryer.
It has now also been unexpectedly discovered that by regulating temperature and relative humidity within a container during a domestic, non-immersion cleaning and refreshment process, dry clean only fabrics are cleaned, dewrinkled and refreshed. The present invention provides such methods for cleaning and refreshing fabrics.